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Perl's decline was cultural

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#181

Post by syklemil »

twoodfin wrote: post #130
Emen15 wrote: post #74

Perl 5's non-breaking conservatism kept old scripts running forever, but it also meant there was never a clear migration path the way Python 3 eventually provided, and that made long term planning a lot harder.

Perl did have `use strict`, so there was at least some plausible path to making non-breaking changes under a new pragma. The OP’s theory that Perl 6’s radicalism allowed Perl 5 to be conservative sounds right to me.

Though at the same time the bit where `use strict` was optional wound up being off-putting to a lot of us, at least in part because we'd always wind up with _something_ that wasn't designed for `use strict` and had, uh, interesting failure modes.

It's the same drive that we see from JS to TS these days, or adding type hints to Python, and even to some extent why people pick up Rust: because you get a refusal to act and an explanation rather than wonky results when you goof.

IME there's been a wider shift away from worse-is-better, and Perl was kind of one of the early casualties of that. Part of that is also how science has marched on: When Python and Perl were new, the most popular typed languages were kind of tedious but not what people would consider _good_ at types these days. Perl was the first language I learned, and if I was transported back to the 1990s, I'd probably still pick it, even if I don't use it in 2025.

(OK, maybe I'd go all in on OCaml. Any way the camel wins.)

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#182

Post by tasty_freeze »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #168
tasty_freeze wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't bad language design that you need to study the language before you can use it. I look at haskell programs and it looks mysterious to me because I haven't spent any time studying it, but I'd not thing to say it is bad language design. Yes, one can write obscure perl code and some love perl golfing. In the same way there is an IOCCC which delights in unreadable code, it doesn't mean that the C language should…

But I can look at most Python code and be able to understand what it does. With perl, I have to look up so much. - Why is there a `1;` on a single line in the middle of this file? - What is `$_`? - This parallel execution manager doesn't actually seem to define what code needs to run in parallel in any specific way, how does this work? - What is this BEGIN block at the start of this Perl file? Why is that necessary?…

Again: python syntax is more akin to what you are used to, and so it feels more comfortable to you.

$_ is inscrutable if you haven't studied perl, but the same thing would happen to anyone who sees a python decorator for the first time. what does "else: do after a while loop in python? Only people who know python know what it does (and I suspect most don't). The different quoting operators are also trivial to learn. In comparison, yield from python is also simple syntax but the semantics are much more involved.

BEGIN? Take 60 seconds to read what it means. And if you knew awk, you'd not have to do that, as it was directly lifted from awk.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#183

Post by ErikCorry »

Insanity wrote: post #83
jordanb wrote: post #8

I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense. Then there was the whole one-liner thing that was all about being clever and obscure. Everything about Python came off as being much more serious and normal for a young nerd who wasn't a theater kid.

I don’t know about the wider Perl community, but I listened to some interviews from Larry Wall and he just came across as a nerdy guy having fun with what he’s doing. I quite liked listening to him.

Larry should be remembered for the development of "patch" more than perl. Without the concept of fuzzily applying patches to modified source files you can't have "git rebase" or "git merge".

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#184

Post by montroser »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #168
tasty_freeze wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't bad language design that you need to study the language before you can use it. I look at haskell programs and it looks mysterious to me because I haven't spent any time studying it, but I'd not thing to say it is bad language design. Yes, one can write obscure perl code and some love perl golfing. In the same way there is an IOCCC which delights in unreadable code, it doesn't mean that the C language should…

But I can look at most Python code and be able to understand what it does. With perl, I have to look up so much. - Why is there a `1;` on a single line in the middle of this file? - What is `$_`? - This parallel execution manager doesn't actually seem to define what code needs to run in parallel in any specific way, how does this work? - What is this BEGIN block at the start of this Perl file? Why is that necessary?…

Yeah, it's true that Perl did not have as a design goal that a complete newcomer should be able to intuitively understand the code without having any prior exposure to the language. There is a little bit of a learning curve, and that was completely expected by Perl's creators. Yes, you have to learn about the idioms above, but they became second-nature. For many of us, the model clicked in our heads and the terseness was worth it. You could express a lot of functionality in very few characters, and if you had invested in learning, it was very quick to grok because common patterns were reduced to familiar abstractions in the language.

And yet, as the industry grew and all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds converged in this space, the tolerance and appetite for funky/terse waned in favor of explicit/verbose/accessible. It's probably for the better in the end, but it did feel a little bit like the mom-and-pop store on the corner that had weird pickled things at the register and a meemaw in the back got replaced by a generic Circle K with a lesser soul.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#185

Post by phil21 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #167
phil21 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting to me how brains work. Perl has always “flowed” for me and made mostly intuitive sense. Every other language I’ve had to hack on to get something done is a struggle for me to fit into some rigid-feeling mental box. I understand I’m the weird one, but man I miss Perl being an acceptable language to pound out a quick program in between “bash script” and “real developer”.

Was Perl one of your first languages by any chance? I freely admit that I've only been poking at it for a few months; maybe by this time next year, I'll be boggled at the comment I left, like it was written by a different person. > in between “bash script” and “real developer”. One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"

Yep, first language I learned. And since I was somewhat early to the Internet thing, I found IRC when I was about 14 years old and actually learned from a lot of the folks who have authored books on Perl or are at least (were) well known in the community.

It certainly was the major factor in how I connected the dots!

Haven’t really thought about it until now, but I suppose having Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz telling you to RTFM guides your early development in a certain manner.

I certainly have never considered myself a developer or programmer though. I can pick up enough syntax to get a quick hack done or start a MVP to demo my ideas, but I leave the “big boy” dev stuff to the professionals who can run circles around me.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#186

Post by Asooka »

jordanb wrote: post #8

I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense. Then there was the whole one-liner thing that was all about being clever and obscure. Everything about Python came off as being much more serious and normal for a young nerd who wasn't a theater kid.

I never interacted with any of that, to me Perl was always "Bash with text processing built-in and no string interpolation pitfalls". I reach for it when I need to write one to two page long utility scripts. Python is too willing to deprecate features (plus the whole 2 to 3 fiasco burned me badly), so I only use it for things I know I will maintain. Perl is for writing a shell script that will run unchanged in perpetuity.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#187

Post by dtauzell »

morshu9001 wrote: post #101
nine_k wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is a great language, the way Scala and Haskell are great: as openly experimental languages, they tried interesting, unorthodox approaches, with varied success. "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say. Perl is not that good a language though for practical purposes. The same way, a breadboard contraption is not what you want to ship as your hardware pro…

Couldn't they have figured out one decent way to do things before releasing features to all users? I tried Scala for a bit then decided it was complicated for no good reason. Idk about Haskell, but I used Erlang which is also purely functional. No matter how long I used it and tried to appreciate its elegance, it became clear this isn't a convenient way to do things generally. But it was designed well, unlike Scala.

If you wanted to write a quick on off script then using magic variables,etc made sense. Writing something you’ll keep? Don’t use those. When Perl 5 introduced references they could have simplified the syntax though.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#188

Post by creer »

altairprime wrote: post #154
creer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You COULD, if you wanted, and spent quite a bit of effort in the pursuit of that hobby, participate in one-liner, or obfuscation, or golfing friendly contests. Which were enabled by perl's expressiveness constructs. Nobody pushed anyone into that. On the contrary "there is more than one way to do it" was there to legitimize that getting the problem solved was the goal - instead of trying to force a one true way (like…

Those experts were horrendously vicious. I can name them and can still describe their dismissive cruelty, since I spent ten years socializing nonstop in the Perl5 core communities (and have a CPAN id, and have an Authors entry in Perl5 core). Think “Linus before he learned to stop insulting people’s worth and focus on critiquing their work instead”. It was absolutely intended as a form of cultural propagation: I can…

You indeed ran into toxic environments. I don't feel that the common, new perl programmer intake path was anything like that. Not what I ever ran into.

Support in forums and such was needlessly short in using RTFM as an answer. People could have pasted a one paragraph pointer to the documentation intake path and that would have helped.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#189

Post by alsetmusic »

phil21 wrote: post #185
pavel_lishin wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Perl one of your first languages by any chance? I freely admit that I've only been poking at it for a few months; maybe by this time next year, I'll be boggled at the comment I left, like it was written by a different person. > in between “bash script” and “real developer”. One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"

Yep, first language I learned. And since I was somewhat early to the Internet thing, I found IRC when I was about 14 years old and actually learned from a lot of the folks who have authored books on Perl or are at least (were) well known in the community. It certainly was the major factor in how I connected the dots! Haven’t really thought about it until now, but I suppose having Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz tellin…

Not the person you replied to, but I thought the same thing. Perl was my first as well, and it certainly shaped the way I think about coding. It made Python feel too rigid and Ruby feel familiar. There's something to be said for the restrictions of an environment when you're learning how to operate in a domain that seems to shape future thinking.

I'm sure there are people who started in a language and later found something that made more sense. I'm just reflecting on what I've found in my experience.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#190

Post by kstrauser »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #80
jordanb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was annoying but if it hadn't happened Python would still be struggling with basic things like Unicode. Organizations struggled with it but they struggle with basically every breaking change. I was on the tooling team that helped an organization handle the transition of about 5 million lines of data science code from python 2.7 to 3.2. We also had to handle other breaking changes like airflow upgrades, spark 2->3,…

With the benefit of hindsight, though, Python 3 could have been done as a non-breaking upgrade. Imagine if the same interpreter supported both Python 3 and Python 2. Python 3 code could import a Python 2 module, or vice versa. Codebases could migrate somewhat more incrementally. Python 2 code's idea of a "string" would be bytes, and python 3's idea of a "string" would be unicode, but both can speak the other's langua…

That split between bytes and unicode made better code. Bytes are what you get from the network. Is it a PNG? A paragraph of text? Who knows! But in Python 2, you treated them both as the same thing: a series of bytes.

Being more or less forced to decode that series into a string of text where appropriate made a huge number of bugs vanish. Oops, forget to run `value=incoming_data.decode()` before passing incoming data to a function that expects a string, not a series of bytes? Boom! Thing is, it was always broken, but now it's visibly broken. And there was no more having to remember if you'd already .decode()d a value or whether you still needed to, because the end result isn't the same datatype anymore. It was so annoying to have an internal function in a webserver, and the old sloppiness meant that sometimes you were calling it with decoded strings and sometimes the raw bytes coming in over the wire, so sometimes it processed non-ASCII characters incorrectly, and if you tried to fix it by making it decode passed-in values, it start started breaking previously-working callers. Ugh, what a mess!

I hated the schism for about the first month because it broke a lot of my old, crappy code. Well, it didn't actually. It just forced me to be aware of my old, crappy code, and do the hard, non-automatable work of actually fixing it. The end result was far better than what I'd started with.

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